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Any man

Any man would be tickled pink to have a double birdsbath of hands in the bush when he was two bits shy of a full deck in the dark of the moon.

Lepisma saccharina, frequently called a silverfish or fishmoth, is a small, wingless insect in the order Thysanura. Its common name derives from the animal’s silvery light grey and blue colour, combined with the fish-like appearance of its movements

Lockjaw

opisthotonus_in_a_patient_suffering_from_tetanus_-_painting_by_sir_charles_bell_-_1809

Tetanus, also known as lockjaw, is an infection characterized by muscle spasms. In the most common type, the spasms begin in the jaw and then progress to the rest of the body. These spasms usually last a few minutes each time and occur frequently for three to four weeks. Spasms may be so severe that bone fractures may occur. Other symptoms may include fever, sweating, headache, trouble swallowing, high blood pressure, and a fast heart rate. Onset of symptoms is typically three to twenty-one days following infection. It may take months to recover. About 10% of those infected die.

Tetanus often begins with mild spasms in the jaw muscles—also known as lockjaw or trismus. The spasms can also affect the facial muscles resulting in an appearance called risus sardonicus. Chest, neck, back, abdominal muscles, and buttocks may be affected. Back muscle spasms often cause arching, called opisthotonos. Sometimes the spasms affect muscles that help with breathing, which can lead to breathing problems.

Prolonged muscular action causes sudden, powerful, and painful contractions of muscle groups, which is called “tetany”. These episodes can cause fractures and muscle tears. Other symptoms include drooling, excessive sweating, fever, hand or foot spasms, irritability, difficulty swallowing, suffocation, heart attack, breathing problems, irregular heartbeat, and uncontrolled urination or defecation.

Severe cases will require admission to intensive care. Human tetanus immunoglobulin injected intrathecally. Tracheotomy and mechanical ventilation for 3 to 4 weeks. Tracheotomy is recommended for securing the airway because the presence of an endotracheal tube is a stimulus for spasm. Magnesium as an intravenous infusion to prevent muscle spasm, Diazepam as a continuous IV infusion, The autonomic effects of tetanus can be difficult to manage (alternating hyper- and hypotension hyperpyrexia/hypothermia) and may require IV labetalol, magnesium, clonidine, or nifedipine. Drugs such as diazepam or other muscle relaxants can be given to control the muscle spasms. In extreme cases it may be necessary to paralyze the patient with curare-like drugs and use a mechanical ventilator.

her hand in front of the mower
mosquito fleet
broke witching stick
fish eyed philosophers
semaphore

in the little time left we’ll try to ford finnegans wake
amidst the uncanny fragility of consciousness

logwood litmus
human cannonball
saddled with this body
roots pulled out from under
from horn to stirrup
isolated in iceland
baby in a car
facebook hung like an albatross
a google reasons to abandon ship
krumholtz

Gödel met Zermelo in Bad Elster in 1931. Olga Taussky-Todd, who was at the same meeting, wrote, “The trouble with Zermelo was that he felt he had already achieved Gödel’s most admired result himself.” His work “Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory” (1940) is a classic of modern mathematics. Towards the end of his life Gödel became convinced that he was being poisoned and, refusing to eat to avoid being poisoned, starved himself to death. Zermelo usually stated his axioms and theorems in words rather than symbols.

Bar Harbor

The second to the last time we went to Bar Harbor we got knocked from stem to stern upside the head as my father drove through the white caps.

Bar Harbor was in the same strip mall as the WOW liquor store, Big Wash coin laundry, and the Vatican Grocery and Halal Meat Mart. Near the corner where OJ got nabbed. Same hemisphere.

In the Christian squadron, five stout and lofty ships were guided by skilful pilots, and manned with the veterans of Italy and Greece, long practised in the arts and perils of the sea. Their weight was directed to sink or scatter the weak obstacles that impeded their passage: their artillery swept the waters: their liquid fire was poured on the heads of the adversaries, who, with the design of boarding, presumed to approach them; and the winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Near the factory where she worked was a shed covering a subterranean passage leading to the phosphate pub, where they served a drink of carbonated water, fruit syrup, and a little phosphoric acid.

Here, then, Panurge had made such progress in purity of heart in the stillness and silence of the desert that he did not even permit himself to look at a woman’s clothing, much less on a woman’s face. For when a woman from nearby chanced to meet him on his way to the cell of a certain elder, along with Archebius who was from the same desert, he, distressed at encountering her, ran back to his own monastery in greater haste than a person would use to flee from a lion or an immense dragon, forgoing the duty of the pious visit that he had set out upon. The situation was such that he was not even prevailed upon by the shouts and pleas of the aforesaid Abba Archebius, who was calling him back so that they might stay on the road that they had started out on in order to ask the elder what they had planned.

Although this was done with zeal for chastity and ardor for purity, nonetheless because it was not done according to knowledge and because the observance of discipline and the measure of appropriate strictness were excessive (for he believed that not merely familiarity with women, which really is harmful, but even the very form of that sex was to be abominated) he immediately suffered such a seizure that his whole body was paralyzed and none of its members could perform any of their functions. For not only his feet and hands but even the mechanism of his tongue, by which speech is formed, were affected, and his very ears lost their sense of hearing. The result was that nothing remained of his humanity apart from an immobile and senseless shape.

To such a state was he reduced that men’s care was in no way sufficient to minister to his sickness, and only womanly attention was of use to him. For when he was brought to a cenobium of holy virgins, food and drink, which he was unable even to beckon for, was produced for him with feminine graciousness, all his needs of nature were satisfied, and this same care was at his disposal for nearly four years—that is, until the end of his life.